NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — As the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations gain momentum and attention, the movement has been getting support from some unlikely places and has spawned questions about what protestors are actually trying to achieve.

On Thursday, even the President of the United States weighed in on the protests and demonstrations.

“I think it expresses the frustrations that the American people feel. You’re still seeing some of the same folks who acted irresponsibly trying to fight efforts to crackdown on abusive practices that got us into this problem in the first place,” Obama said.

The demonstrations have virtually taken over Lower Manhattan for more than two weeks and grown into thousands Wednesday night as college students walked out of class and labor unions took the streets in solidarity with the anti-Wall Street protest.

According to its website, Occupy Wall Street defines itself as a “leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%.”

“In terms of ignoring the nuance of reality and trying to go back to just political ideals and humanist ideals, yeah, it’s like the Tea Party,” Charles Kopel told CBS 2’s Lou Young.

Veteran activist George MacDonald says, however, he isn’t sure what is happening in Lower Manhattan.

“We knew what we wanted and then when we got the attention of the government, we implemented the solutions,” he told Young. “There are 50 or 60 messages that I’ve seen here.”

On Wednesday, various labor unions joined the protest, including the United Federation of Teachers, the Transport Workers Union, the Service Employees International Union as well as the Working Families Party and MoveOn.org.

But a report Thursday morning in the New York Times suggests that some of the unions are joining the Occupy Wall Street movement in order to have a louder voice for their own issues.

“The Transport Workers Union, representing more than 200,000 active and retired workers, today endorsed the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protests taking place in New York City and called on TWU members and local unions to join similar efforts taking place across the country,” the TWU said in a statement.